Billhook

Two o’clock today is a bit too warm for arbwork! Only a slight breeze again from the North East, but not enough to cool

Lovely day on Saturday and Sunday. Sun shone for the bride on Saturday all day. About time too! The wheat desperately needs a lot of sun to fill the grains. Driving through the countryside I cannot help notice the abundance of greenery in the trees and hedges, must be all the CO2!

Well this is the great thing about Arbtalk! I thought that I knew it all with well over 50 years of pissing about with all types of petrol engines. The carb looks just like a brand new one after I had taken it off and blew it (no debris or deposits visible) Took out the jets and float needle all clean as a whistle,fresh fuel. I will buy a new carb and a length of fuel line. One thing at a time and if the carb does not fix it then try the fuel line as suggested by Agrimog

Good advice, I will investigate

Freezing buggery bollocking cold North East wind that has been blowing for weeks now. I thought I would take Daisy Etta, the old D7 out to level the tracks that have been beaten up with the appalling weather and traffic. She started first time as usual, with the 1300cc twin cylinder petrol donkey. A few blaps and then smooth, all 14 litres of it. Nothing much is going to argue with the two ton blade and the total twenty tons of metal! Does a fantastic job with the blade angled, leaves it like a billiard table. First track unfortunately straight into the wind so bollocks well and truly cooled! Then down to the shelter of the log cabin. The difference in temperature between two places on the farm less than half a mile apart is astounding!

Plenty of gaps I can assure you, but being a better camera man than a joiner makes all the difference!

Just finished the new decking and applied first coat of Cuprinol deck oil

He was quite chuffed when he found a statue of Sir John Franklin in our local town, and I have a photo of him standing by it and the Franklin Bakery!

Dan Franklin came up with a team of about ten in 2000. Most were learning the full scribe method paid for by a grant scheme. He had not worked with Poplar before and found it easy to work with. I first had the idea after a friend came back from Oregon where he said there was a log built church, over 120 years old built from Poplar using the full scribe method I have three Poplar plantations that my father put in in 1960, when all the graphs were showing that there would be a massive demand for matches at the Millenium due to the projected increase in smoking. Father told me that I would be very rich in the year 2000! But due to butane lighters and people packing up I had all these trees looking for a home.Very hard to predict outcomes with models and graphs as the climatologists are discovering He had the same idea by planting Spruce and Pine for pit props in the coal mines!! Anybody looking for some very tall trees??? Log Cabins | Woodenways WWW.WOODENWAYS.COM Mine is pictured in the first and third photo. Before we started I had gone on a course at his site in Devon

They should both be rotted within a couple of years but the log cabin was built of Poplar in 2000 and the Turkey Oak decking the same so 23 years of weather. The cabin has no rot at all but it is standing off the ground on six large sandstones so air is all around same with the deck except it is prone to water sitting on top in severe rain. Anyway it has cooled down a bit today so I thought I would lay some of the warped Turkey Oak boards that I cut at the same time twenty three years ago It does show that these timbers will stand being outside as long as they are not in contact with the ground and are given a chance to dry They have been sitting under cover and trying to make them fit without my generator working is a challenge! Some are more bent than a banana! Just have my Stihl electric but it is not so good at planing! I tell my wife it just adds character but she just says I am lazy! As I am lazy I think I will just fill in the worst cracks with a bit of sawdust and wood glue

Thanks, I took out the main jet and blew it with the airline and it appeared to be like new. The governor is a good call and I will try and look more closely at it

thanks, that sounds like the answer

I have tried two saws, one the 1300 watt DeWalt and the other I believe a soft start mitre saw 1899 watt both caused immediate shut down . I will try a lead lamp and a small planer today, both will work with my little 550 watt Kawasaki generator. What I find confusing if it was the case that the motors were too hefty to start, is why does it take so long to restart. I would expect it to cut out in a slightly different way if it was fuel, perhaps a bit more spluttering and stop starting. Again when restarting after a pause, I would expect the fuel to have recovered enough to run on no load as it does in the beginning. This I agree sounds very much like fuel starvation, but as sherlock Holmes said "Once you have eliminated all possibilities, the answer however improbable must be the only thing that is left" Could it therefore be some problem with the electronic ignition.

Agree , but it pours out of the float chamber when I remove the drain bolt, I have cleaned the main jet and everything in the carb, so what have I missed??

I bought this generator new and have not used it for some time. It has done no work and basically is as new. I emptied the fuel and put in new fresh fuel. Pull started and it fired up first time and ran smoothly as you can hear at the start of this clip.It will continue to run in this mode until the tank empties It is rated at 2300 watts but as soon as I pulled the trigger on the 1150 watt De Walt saw it cuts out. It then is very difficult to start again but eventually goes after fiddling around with the choke lever. I took off the carb and found it to be like new inside, but I still blew it out. Took out the screw on the fuel chamber and fuel pours out easily so there is no blockage there. Took out the float and needle valve both spotless. Electronic ignition seems to be ok Any ideas??

Would they not strip the bark further down> The top branches are a bit thin to support a grey squirrel

We seem to have several young Sycamores with similar symptoms to Ash dieback. Is this a well known phenomenon?

Yes such bravery, especially going off on two tours or more, was that 28 missions before you had relief. I said before that they needed people of pilot quality to operate the turret, the radar and the signalling device and this gentleman had done more hours as an instructor in Canada than the pilot of his Lancaster! But such was the anger at the bombing of our cities and the whole war , that they were determined to do their bit. The rear gunners were particularly vulnerable as the Germans would try to nail them first. Also they could not wear a parachute which was kept behind in the fuselage so imagine trying to go back, find it put it on and exit while the craft may be burning or spinning out of control It says on the web that the average life expectancy for a rear gunner early on in the war was five missions. In Phil's log book one of his missions was eleven hours.! Another thin he told me was that because they were isolated from the rest of the crew there was a real danger of frostbite, Therefore they had heated flying suits with heated gloves and heated boots. In the first part of the war before 1943 and Mustang escorts, they lost most of the bombers that went out. This was reversed later but still it was so terrifying to be a rear gunner that some deliberately took a boot off to get frostbite so that they could go off sick. This became a court martial offence for lack of moral fibre. One mission Phil, my friend, had a fault in his electric circuit and had the wonderful choice of a burnt foot or frostbite and court martial! In another incident I was told at East Kirkby by another veteran, that there was an airman who had just done his two tours, nerves rattled, but he thought that he would just watch the Lancs taxiing out that evening to wish them well. He stood in front of the latrines hut smoking a cigarette. The rear gunners would just exercise their turrets to check they were revolving correctly as the aircraft taxied however one of the rear gunners accidently caught the trigger and it took the whole of the roof of the latrine off. Did not do much good for his already shattered nerves!

Well done finding that. I had not heard of the name of the infra red Z equipment. Indeed when I took the gentleman to Coningsby, nobody there knew about it, The good men that they were kept it secret even well after the war. When we had looked around the Lancaster we went to have a coffee in the mess and a farmer had brought over a Dutchman who had been tending the war graves as a thank you. He was looking through the rear gunner's log book and saw that he had done a raid on Flushing Island (Vlissingen) "I vos zere! You did fantastic job and ze Germans made us work for weeks with bulldozers trying to repair ze damage" What was the chance of that encounter!

We had an old lorry driver who collected sugar beet for us and never occurred to us that he was a tail gunner in a Lancaster in WW2 . He actually was trained up as a pilot and instructor in Canada but on his return to UK he found that there were no positions for him as a pilot, but they needed people with a pilot’s capability to operate the new radar operated gun turrets which had to be rotated in a pattern to cover the sky behind. However this yawed the aircraft and made the crew feel sick so was unpopular. This system was well known but what was not so well known was the infrared signalling device to link with our own night fighters so that they did not shoot each other down I took him down to the Lancaster at Coningsby and we wedged him back in the rear turret. He was quite a large man. I did see a tear in his eye

Just Jane resides at East Kirkby, near Spilsby and the museum there is well worth a visit. You can book a taxi run in the Lancaster. There is a spooky old control tower restored to how it was in the war as well as a hangar full of aircraft bits from the war I went down there a few years ago to witness the sound of twelve Merlins as the BBMF Lanc and the Canadian one came over while Jane was taxiing

Just thought I would take the old girl out for a spin to practice my three point landings! And nobody is going to argue with my pair of Browning 303s!

I would suggest that because the ivy was so dead and dry that it burnt quickly enough not to damage the bark before running out of fuel. It was quite spectacular at night though!